At dawn this Thursday a new flight leaves for Moscow to bring another game of Sputnik V. The ninth batch of vaccines is available at Sheremetyevo airport and, as usual, the number of doses is not yet known: it depends on factors such as supply and packaging. In the last hours it was also confirmed that 218,400 doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine arrive on Sunday morning at seven, provided by the World Health Organization’s Covax program. In the case of Sputnik, the Argentine government will try to make the largest amount of dose 1, because as almost all governments are providing, the strategy is to immunize as many people as possible with dose 1, postponing dose 2. In In the case of Oxford / AstraZeneca the two doses are the same, so all these vaccines will be used in unvaccinated people.
Although the opposition seems to have as its slogan “There are no vaccines and we are all going to die”, the dose flow remains fairly constant. Argentina is not among the central countries with a huge wallet -the United States paid more than 40,000 million dollars to laboratories and Europe 21,000 million euros-, but it achieved a certain pace and With the arrival of these two items, the figure of five million doses will be widely exceeded.
Negotiations with the Direct Investment Fund of Russia (RDIF) and the Gamaleya Institute are in charge of the minister Carla Vizzotti, the presidential advisor Cecilia Nicolini and sometimes even the president of the Nation himself, Alberto Fernández, intervenes. As anticipated Page 12, the ninth flight takes place before the weekend. So far, the smallest batch was 220,000 vaccines and the largest was 700,000, so the number of doses will be in that range. On Friday an Aerolineas plane brought 330,000 and on Monday another plane brought half a million.
For days, the national government has known that it will receive the departure of Covax, a WHO program whose name comes from the words collaboration Y vaccines (vax). Argentina bought and paid Covax nine million doses, but as in all cases, the supply is late and meager: there is a lack of vaccines and the central countries are left with almost all of them. The Covax program tried to equalize the opportunities of countries in access to doses. In that sense, it began supplying some African countries that had not received a single one. The doses that arrive on Sunday at 7 o’clock come from the Netherlands.
Three flights to China are pending to search for three million Sinopharm vaccines. The contract is signed and the doses are supposed to be available, but there is a delay due to packaging problems – special boxes are needed, which are not easy to get – and there is a delay in documentation. In the Casa Rosada they are also waiting with the expected authorization of the Anmat for the Sinopharm to be applied to people over 60, as is done in China, Pakistan and Senegal.
The other outstanding provision is also from Oxford / AstraZeneca. In February, it was agreed to purchase two batches of 580,000 doses. The first arrived and the second was to come in March. For now it has not arrived but there are chances that the shipment will arrive in the first days of April. These vaccines come from India and are branded Covishield. Then, already in the middle of next month, the doses of Oxford / AstraZeneca would begin to arrive, the active part of which was manufactured in Argentina, in the mAbxience laboratory. The end of the manufacturing and packaging is done in Mexico, where there were problems to get some filters that are essential for production and that the United States blocked the export. After a management by the Mexican Foreign Minister, the obstacle was overcome, but due to the delay AstraZeneca made a factory in the United States available. That explains why the first doses come from the northern country and, from the second game, the vaccines will arrive from Mexico. The first shipment to Argentina, after April 15, will be 900,000 doses.
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